Drupal 8 to be Based on Symfony2 Components

Drupal, the CMS behind millions of websites, including the White House website, is getting a core infrastructure overhaul to optimize its code base. Drupal developers decided to go with an existing open source solution instead of creating a new project. "We decided to use a few components from Symfony2," Drupal creator Dries Buytaert tells CMSWire. "We'll continue to use components from PHP frameworks — not necessarily limited to Symfony2 — where we see a good fit."

Why Symfony?

The Symfony and Drupal open source communities should fit well together, according to the announcement:

The involvement and responsiveness of the Symfony community, in particular the community investment of Fabien Potencier, the Symfony lead developer and Lukas Smith, one of the core developers; the quality and the numerous possibilities offered by the different Symfony2 Components, soon tipped the balance towards a collaboration between the two communities."

The Drupal community is one of the more active, better-known open source communities. Symfony components, a Sensio Labs open source project, are standalone and reusable PHP classes. The announcement says that two Symfony2 components have already been selected for the next Drupal. ClassLoader unifies CMS classes management, and HttpFoundation provides an object abstraction on top of the HTTP specification.

Drupal 8

Some other big changes are planned for Drupal 8. Most of the templates and theme functions will be revamped, along with implementing new form input types and elements to convert Drupal to HTML5. In addition to the focus on HTML5, other core initiatives for Drupal 8 include an improved process for designing Drupal themes and improved Drupal core support for using multiple languages for content, structure and interface.

Drupal 8 should also be more mobile-friendly, with responsive themes and improved front-end performance.

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